Stevenson Toons In for ’56?

In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower famously called on Madison Avenue advertising firms to design television spots for his campaign. He supplemented the work of the “Mad Men” with a series of cartoons animated by none other than Roy Disney (Walt’s older brother). The most famous of these cartoons was this one:

These ads were generally considered to be one of Eisenhower’s keys to victory. While they weren’t exactly detailed policy statements, they certainly stuck with the voters. (Go on, just try to get that jingle out of your head. I dare you.)

Naturally, Adlai Stevenson was horrified by the idea that political candidates might be “sold” to the public using jingles and advertising techniques. “I think the American people will be shocked by such contempt for their intelligence,” Stevenson huffed in response to the Eisenhower ads. “This isn’t Ivory Soap versus Palmolive.” Instead, he preferred to rely on half-hour televised speeches, which weren’t quite as catchy. (The fact that said speeches aired at 10:30 PM didn’t help matters.)

Over Stevenson’s objections, his campaign did run some actual ads. However, their idea of a catchy campaign jingle was… this:

Yikes.

When Stevenson ran against Ike again in ’56, his advisors forced him to accept the fact that he would need to do better than late-night stemwinding speeches and odes from lounge singers in his advertising.

Stevenson even agreed to bring in a Madison Avenue firm to work with him. (Unfortunately, all the big-name firms turned him down, and he wound up with an obscure agency called Norman, Craig, and Kummel.)

They swapped out the 30-minute speeches for a series of five-minute spots called “The Man From Libertyville,” which tried (with limited success) to make Stevenson seem like a folksy family man. They ran the “How’s That Again, General?” series of ads, in which Kefauver pointed out Eisenhower’s many broken campaign promises.

And they even tried a couple of cartoons. Here’s one dramatizing the “squeeze” that farmers were facing at the time, battling rising costs and lower prices:

Here’s another one, featuring an everyman in a rainstorm complaining about taxes, after which a GOP official comes out with an umbrella labeled “GOP TAX RELIEF”… only to walk right past our man and hold the umbrella over a rich businessman:

These cartoons were pretty decent ads: They made their point in a visually arresting fashion, and they were more memorable than a half-hour speech (or a “homey” five-minute anecdote).

That said, you can tell that Disney wasn’t working on these ads. The animation style is considerably less sophisticated. They honestly remind me of the old “Rocky and Bullwinkle” cartoons, which were hilarious but infamous for their low-budget animation style.

(I spent some time trying to figure out if Jay Ward, the creative mind behind “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” was involved in these ads in some way. It seems that he wasn’t. Gamma Productions, the Mexican studio that animated “Rocky and Bullwinkle,” didn’t open until 1957. That said, the style definitely looks familiar.)

As we know, the Stevenson/Kefauver campaign was crushed by the Ike juggernaut in November 1956. It’s unlikely that even the combined work of Disney and Mad Ave’s best and brightest made that much of a difference.

Still, it’s interesting to imagine what might have been if Kefauver had been atop the ticket in ’52 or ’56. Having seen the power of television during his organized crime hearings, I certainly think he’d have been more amenable than Stevenson to employing modern advertising techniques. But could he have hit on a slogan as infernally catchy as “I Like Ike”?